Google has bought the price comparison website BeatThatQuote.com for £37.7m in
a deal that will further raise concerns over its dominance of web search.

BeatThatQuote.com competes with bigger rivals such as Comparethemarket.com and Confused.com in offering consumers instant comparisons of financial products. It also wholesales its underlying technology to other websites to allow them to offer similar services.

Announcing the acquisition, BeatThatQuote.com's managing director John Paleomylites said being part of Google will allow it to "offer more transparency and better pricing information than existing online offerings".

"We are confident that by combining BeatThatQuote.com's expertise in UK financial products with Google's technology, we'll accelerate innovation in this field, benefiting consumers and the companies offering these products," he added.

BeatThatQuote.com was founded in 2005 and its most recent available accounts report an annual loss of £2m on an £8.5m turnover.

Mr Paleomylites, a serial entrepreneur from north London, owned around 90 per cent of shares in the firm prior to its acquisition by Google. He previously sold another start-up, JCP, which made internet security software, to Sun Microsystems for £40m in 2000.

His latest deal further extends Google's reach into so-called "vertical" search markets. In recent years it has diversified to offer not only general web search, but also specialised price comparison and shopping search.

The potential for Google to use its dominance of general search - in Europe it has more than 90 per cent market share - to muscle its way into vertical search is now the subject of regulatory investigations on both sides of the Atlantic.

EU antitrust officials are investigating a complaint by Foundem, another British price comparison service, that Google "is exploiting its dominance of search in ways that stifle innovation, suppress competition, and erode consumer choice".

Meanwhile the US Department of Justice is in negotiations with Google over its attempted $700m acquisition of ITA, a leading flight search service.

Much of the regulatory concern is focused on the effect of Universal Search, a major 2007 update to Google's general search engine which incorporates results from vertical search engines. Critics charge that Google uses Universal Search to unfairly promote its own vertical services and relegate rivals, which it denies.